Chips drive future of car safety

In a bid to make cars more safe Philips Semiconductors and MobilEye, a developer of intelligent software for cars, are to manufacture a system-on-a-chip for automotive driving systems.

The first silicon samples will be available for testing by the end of the year, and the companies are targeting the chip at cars due to be produced in 2005.

The new integrated circuit will deliver real-time applications using sensors to detect other vehicles, pedestrians and road signs.

It will also include visual motion analysis methods for setting apart patterns such as passing and crossing vehicles, and image processing techniques for lane-following and path prediction.

The pattern classification module can also apparently accommodate objects such as human faces.

Pascal Langlois, vice president for Philips Semiconductors' Global Market Segment Automotive division, explained that the companies will speed the development of cost-effective electronic safety systems.

"This is a great development in bringing active safety devices into the car," he said.

MobilEye has already developed an algorithm and reference platform that uses a single video camera for adaptive cruise control systems.

The pair said that the chip is adapted to camera-based cruise control rather than radar-based systems, because the former will have greater applications as the systems move forward.

The architecture includes 2.2Mb of SDRam on-chip memory and integrates multiple ARM946 programmable central micro-processors for driving general purpose computations and application level programming.

There are also four application specific modules for image re-processing, motion analysis, pattern recognition and lane following.

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